The War That Obama Forgot

It is a war that continues even as the president said that our wars are ending. It is a war that persists even as he said that "We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war." It is a war that endures and flourishes even as the president said that Americans are "heirs to those who won the peace and not just the war, who turned sworn enemies into the surest of friends."

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I am not speaking, of course, of the wars that the president spoke of yesterday, in his second inaugural speech -- the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he spoke of without naming. I am speaking of the war that is currently being prosecuted in countries where we are not supposed to be at war, like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. I am speaking of the perpetual war, the shadow war, the invisible war against invisible enemies, the war whose latest manifestation came just two days ago, when three men identified as militants, names unknown, were killed by an American drone. I am speaking of the war that the president did not speak about, even though his Administration has never called it anything but a war, and it has killed thousands of people.

Indeed, it was just two months ago that the Obama Administration once again characterized its drone war as a war, and justified it as such. In a speech delivered at Oxford, in England, Jeh Johnson, then the general counsel for the Department of Defense, stated unequivocally that "the United States government is in an armed conflict against Al Qaeda and associated forces, to which the laws of armed conflict apply." He declared that "it is an unconventional war against an unconventional enemy," but that "President Obama...has insisted that our efforts in pursuit of this enemy stay firmly rooted in conventional legal principles." And he warned, at last, that "in the current conflict with Al Qaeda, I can offer no prediction about when this conflict will end, or whether we are, as Winston Churchill described it, near the 'beginning of the end.'"

Why didn't the President's speech reflect any of this? Why did he say that the "decade of war" prompted by Al Qaeda's attack on America is ending, when by his Administration's own insistence it is not? The answer is that he did because he could -- and that he could because he has cast this war as a war against war, and because his investment in secrecy has yielded an inestimable return. No one expected him to speak about drones in a speech rhetorically haunted by bound wounds and better angels. But no one, certainly, could have expected him to wish our wars away, when American soldiers are still being killed in Afghanistan, and when we are still killing people -- and, in the name of war, reserving the right to keep killing people -- all over the world.

President Obama's second inaugural was supposed to sound something like Lincoln's: the speech of a man tired of war, and eager to move the nation beyond its bloody reach. In truth, it was the speech of a man who has perfected a form of war that can be written off as a kind of peace. He was able to put the pain of war in the past because his efforts to expand painless war have come to fruition. That there is no political disadvantage to the Lethal Presidency was made abundantly clear by the Lethal President's speech; that there remains a moral cost was only apparent in what he didn't say. We are thankfully ending a fruitless war in which Americans have gotten and are getting killed; we are continuing a war in which Americans do the killing, and that Barack Obama was able to imply that this is no war at all demonstrates its danger. Two months ago, Jeh Johnson told the English that we are locked in a war with Al Qaeda for the foreseeable future; yesterday, Barack Obama told the American people and the rest of the world that our decade of war is ending, which only proved that truth is not only the first casualty of war.